What Office Cleaning in Melbourne Actually Costs — and What Moves the Price
Every office manager in Melbourne has had the same two quotes on the desk: one that looks reasonable and one that is a third cheaper. This post is about why, and about how to tell which one will still be cleaning your office in six months.
We do not publish a rate card, and we are wary of anyone who does. But that is not the same as being cagey about money, so here is how the price is built.
The five inputs
1. Floor area, and what is on it. A 500 m² open-plan floor with sixty desks is not the same job as a 500 m² floor with twelve offices, three meeting rooms and a boardroom. Fixtures drive time more than square metres do.
2. Frequency. Daily servicing costs more per month than weekly but less per visit, because a floor cleaned every night never gets far from clean. Three visits a week is the most common inner-Melbourne arrangement for an office of 20 to 80 staff.
3. The cleaning window. A CBD tower with after-hours access through a loading dock, a security desk and a lift card is slower to get into than a ground-floor suite in Hawthorn with a key. Evening and overnight work is priced under the Cleaning Services Award, which carries shift loadings; a cleaner quoting evening work at a day rate is either not paying the loading or not going to be around long.
4. Bathrooms and kitchens. These are the time sinks. A floor with two bathrooms and a kitchen takes materially longer than one that shares base-building amenities.
5. Consumables and extras. Toilet paper, hand towel, soap, bin liners — supplied by the cleaner and itemised, or bought by you. Periodic work like carpet extraction, hard-floor scrubbing and internal glass sits outside the routine price and should be quoted as separate lines you can accept or decline.
Honest ranges
With those caveats, Melbourne CBD and inner-east offices in 2026 typically land in these bands, excluding GST:
| Office | Typical arrangement | Monthly range | |---|---|---| | Suite, 10–20 staff, ~150–250 m² | 2–3 visits a week | $600 – $1,300 | | Floor, 30–60 staff, ~400–700 m² | 3–5 visits a week | $1,800 – $4,000 | | Multi-floor, 100+ staff, 1,500 m²+ | Daily | $6,000 upward |
Anything far below these bands is paying someone below the award, skipping the bathrooms, or planning to renegotiate after the first invoice.
The questions that expose a cheap quote
- Are the cleaners employees or subcontractors? Subcontracted labour is how the very cheap quotes are built. Ask, and ask for the answer in writing.
- What is the award rate and shift loading you are paying? A cleaner who can answer this has priced the job. One who cannot has guessed.
- How will I know the clean happened? "Trust us" is not a system. We sign every visit in and out inside a geofence around the building, with a photo, so the attendance record is a fact you can check rather than a claim on the invoice.
- Who inspects, and how often? A supervisor should walk the floor on a cycle and score it. Ours do every three weeks, and the score is available to you.
- What is the notice period? A 12-month term with a 90-day exit is the shape of a contract that expects you to be unhappy. We work on 30 days' notice, because the alternative is keeping clients by holding them.
Switching without a gap
Most Melbourne offices that change cleaner do it mid-lease with a provider still in place. The clean way to do it is a 30-day handover: a walkthrough, a written scope, daily supervision in the first week and an inspection at day 7, 14 and 30. The only real constraint is your current cleaner's notice period, so read that clause before you start comparing quotes.
If your office is in the CBD, Docklands, Southbank, Richmond or the eastern professional belt, our office cleaning Melbourne page sets out what is included and how we work, and the suburb pages for Melbourne CBD and Hawthorn have the local detail. Or read how often an office should be cleaned first.